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Course Description:
This course provides an overview of Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Students will
read one Caribbean novel but are expected to foray into works written by other
Caribbean authors. At the beginning of the course, students will be introduced to basic
key concepts and theoretical approaches relevant to the Caribbean context. The course
aims to enhance students’ reading skills; and to help them develop the ability to
critically engage the Anglophone Caribbean Text, by paying attention to issues of
cultural identity, representation, colonialism, race, gender, nationalism, language, and
creolization. At the end of the course, students will have a heightened awareness of non-
canonical literature and of some of the issues facing postcolonial nations.

Required Texts:

 Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea, Copies for sale at the department (see Kader)

Recommended Text:

Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847)

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611) Full text Available
[shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html];
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) (selections)
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (in TFA,
p. 169-181)
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (selections);
Michael Thorpe – “‘The Other Side’: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre,” (in WSS, p.
173-181)
Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) (selections) “A Far Cry From Africa”, poem available
at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19973#

Suggested Links:
Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Small Axe
The Caribbean Writer
Bibliothèque Numérique des Caraïbes